HealthGPT: A Medical Large Vision-Language Model for Unifying Comprehension and Generation via Heterogeneous Knowledge Adaptation

We present HealthGPT, a powerful Medical Large Vision-Language Model (Med-LVLM) that integrates medical visual comprehension and generation capabilities within a unified autoregressive paradigm. Our bootstrapping philosophy is to progressively adapt heterogeneous comprehension and generation knowledge to pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs). This is achieved through a novel heterogeneous low-rank adaptation (H-LoRA) technique, which is complemented by a tailored hierarchical visual perception (HVP) approach and a three-stage learning strategy (TLS). To effectively learn the HealthGPT, we devise a comprehensive medical domain-specific comprehension and generation dataset called VL-Health. Experimental results demonstrate exceptional performance and scalability of HealthGPT in medical visual unified tasks. Our project can be accessed at https://github.com/DCDmllm/HealthGPT.

In general applications, AI models have been developed to both understand and generate different types of data, such as recognizing objects in images or generating pictures based on text descriptions. However, such unified models have not yet been explored or developed in the field of medical imaging. This is largely due to a lack of large-scale, high-quality medical data and the distinct requirements of understanding and generation tasks in healthcare.To address this, we introduce HealthGPT, the first large vision-language model designed to unify both understanding and generation tasks in the medical domain. We use a quantization technique to represent medical images as sequences of "tokens" similar to text, allowing the model to process and generate both images and text in a consistent way. We also propose a novel model architecture that stores task-specific knowledge separately and combines it using a multi-stage training process.To support this approach, we built a new dataset called VL-Health, which includes a range of medical image tasks covering both understanding and generation. Our experiments show that HealthGPT achieves strong performance on both types of tasks. We open-source our dataset and model weights to encourage further research on unified AI models in healthcare.